September 02, 2007

Put a Little LUV in Your Logo!

In the first meeting of my undergraduate elective "Competing for Customers and Capital" at Tulane University I projected the following word on the computer screens in very large letters:

LUV

Then in the big classroom, speaking softly into my lapel mike, I asked:

What company owns this brand name?

My question was greeted with stunned silence. The students quietly discussed what it might be. Finally someone asked: Is it Procter and Gamble's brand of disposable diapers? To which I replied: Close but no cigar. LUV actually is the ticker symbol for Southwest Airlines.

Everyone said: We knew that -- but a ticker symbol is not a brand name! To which I replied: On Wall Street it is.

CLEVER TICKERSIn his July 13, 2007 article published on Zacks Investment Research web site, Jim Licato asks the following questions:

Do stocks with clever ticker symbols outperform or under-perform the overall market? Do investors interpret such symbols as silly marketing ploys or will they recall memorable ticker symbols when they are contemplating which stocks to add to their portfolio? Well, these are the questions that Professor Gary Smith at Pomona College in California asked himself.

Some stocks have clever, eye-catching ticker symbols: for example, LUV (Southwest Airlines), MOO (United Stockyards), and GEEK (Internet America). These clever tickers might be a useful signal of the company's creativity, a memorable marker that appeals to investors, or a warning that the company feels it must resort to gimmicks to attract investors. This paper investigates the performance of stocks with clever ticker symbols during the years 1984-2004. Surprisingly, a portfolio of clever-ticker stocks would have beaten the market by a substantial and statistically significant margin, contradicting the efficient market hypothesis.

The authors found that 51 clever-ticker stocks delivered annual compound returns of 23.5% compared with the whole NASDAQ/NYSE portfolio which delivered returns of 12.3%.

... investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency (that people tend to prefer easily processed information) on short-term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and two analyses of naturalistic real-world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term (abstract).

The 3rd in their series of studies is most relevant here because it examined

... the effects of fluency on stock performance in a semantically impoverished context: by using the pronounceablity of each company's three-letter stock ticker code as a predictor of performance (page 9370).

A fluent ticker was one that could be pronounced [e.g. KAR] compared with one that could not be pronounced [e.g. RDO].

The results of the 3rd study were quite interesting. The authors calculated the excess profits earned by an investment of $1,000 in the basket of NYSE and AMEX stocks with pronounceable tickers compared with non-pronounceable tickers. On the first day of the IPO the excess yield was $83.35. At the end of one week the excess yield was $42.40. After six months it was $37.10. Even after one year the excess was $20.25. Their tests for company size and industry effects were not significant.

SEMANTICALLY IMPOVERISHED TICKERSInterbrand recently released its 2007 list of the 100 most valuable brands in the world. Fourteen of the top 15 brands also have a ticker symbol. How many of the following tickers (in alphabetical order) are pronounceable?

AXP, BMW, C, DAI, DIS, GE, HPQ, IBM, INTC, KO, MCD, NOK, MSFT, TM

Only five of the tickers (in green) owned by 14 of the top 15 most valuable brands in the world are pronounceable. But none are particularly clever. And the other nine are more or less semantically impoversided.

It turns out that at least 80 of the 100 most valuable brands in the Interbrand list also have ticker symbols. The other 20 brands are owned either by private companies or are divisions of public ones. Only 15 of the 80 are pronounceable. Among the remaining 65 tickers the most semantically challenged are 005930 (Samsung on the Korean Stock Exchange) and RTRSY (Reuters on the NASDAQ). Only four of the pronounceable tickers are as clever as LUV. These are BUD, CAT, HOG and PEP. Why was LUV not included in the fluency study? Because Southwest Airlines was not among the stocks listed in the Global New Issues Database from 1990 through 2004.

WHY NOT PUT LUV IN THEIR HEART?If LUV is the brand name for Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV) on Wall Street, then why didn’t my students know this? It's probably because undergraduate seniors, even in a business school, don't trade many stocks on their own. But this raises a more important question: what would be the impact on its stock price if Southwest's management were to co-brand its corporate logo and its ticker symbol? Let's see, the company's logo is:

That red heart with wings makes co-branding easy. Why not put LUV in their heart?

... the term 'co-branding' is relatively new to the business vocabulary and is used to encompass a wide range of marketing activity involving the use of two (and sometimes more) brands. Thus co-branding could be considered to include sponsorships, where Marlboro lends it name to Ferrari or accountants Ernst and Young support the Monet exhibition ... The list of possibilities is endless. (page 1).

Would these authors consider combining trademarks and tickers as one of those endless possibilities? Tickers are not listed in the index to their book. And my students said a ticker symbol is not a brand name. But ticker symbols have all the salient characteristics of a brand name.

The ticker symbol is a unique proprietary asset. It is a financial trademark. It stands as assurance to investors that buying it will deliver a genuine share of a company's stock. Because the ticker symbol practically is the product, it's superior to a trademark: even if you buy a share of LUV online you know you get a genuine Southwest Airlines common stock, unlike when you buy a Gucci bag or a Cartier watch on a city street.

Stock markets and product markets operate separately, but interact in many subtle ways. Maybe more passengers would become stockholders, thus driving up the demand for Southwest Airline shares, if they saw LUV in the logo at the front of their Boeing 737.

Would it pay to mary your company's ticker to its trademark? It might, if that ticker were clever or fluent ... or both. What do you think?